Book picks similar to
Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson
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Noises Off
Michael Frayn - 1982
The two begin to interlock as the characters make their exits from Nothing On only to find themselves making entrances into the even worse nightmare going on backstage. In the end, at the disastrous final performance, the two plots can be kept separate no longer, and coalesce into a single collective nervous breakdown.
Oslo
J.T. Rogers - 2017
Combining investigative zeal and theatrical imagination with insider access, Oslo invites you into the chambers where the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization were forged during nine fraught months in 1993.” — New York Times“A riveting political thriller. Oslo makes a complex historical event feel intimate and profoundly affecting.”— Associated Press“Gripping, big-boned and remarkably entertaining. Oslo feels excruciatingly necessary and timely.”—New York MagazineWhen the Israeli prime minister and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization shook hands on the White House lawn in 1993, the world watched in awe. Oslo tells the story of the key people who orchestrated this momentous occasion, emphasizing the intricate (and sometimes comical) human journey that led to this historic event. The diplomats and politicians from Israel, Palestine, Norway, and America who participated in the behind-the-scenes discussions come to life in Rogers’ wonderfully complex characters. As much a story about people as politics, Oslo casts a bright light on the humans behind the history.Oslo premiered in the fall of 2016 in a sold-out run at Lincoln Center and opens on Broadway in April 2017.J.T. Rogers’ plays include Blood and Gifts, The Overwhelming, White People, and Madagascar. He was nominated for a 2009 Olivier Award for his work as one of the original playwrights for The Great Game: Afghanistan. He is a 2012 Guggenheim fellow in playwriting. Other recent awards include NEA/TCG and NYFA fellowships, the Pinter Review Prize for Drama, the American Theatre Critics Association’s Osborne Award, and the William Inge Center for the Arts’ New Voices Award.A politically charged drama from acclaimed playwright J.T. Rogers
Ruined
Lynn Nottage - 2009
. . . Lynn Nottage’s beautiful, hideous and unpretentiously important play [is] a shattering, intimate journey into faraway news reports.”—Linda Winer, Newsday“An intense and gripping new drama . . . the kind of new play we desperately need: well-informed and unafraid of the world’s brutalities. Nottage is one of our finest playwrights, a smart, empathetic and daring storyteller who tells a story an audience won’t expect.”—David Cote, Time Out New YorkA rain forest bar and brothel in the brutally war-torn Congo is the setting for Lynn Nottage’s extraordinary new play. The establishment’s shrewd matriarch, Mama Nadi, keeps peace between customers from both sides of the civil war, as government soldiers and rebel forces alike choose from her inventory of women, many already “ruined” by rape and torture when they were pressed into prostitution. Inspired by interviews she conducted in Africa with Congo refugees, Nottage has crafted an engrossing and uncommonly human story with humor and song served alongside its postcolonial and feminist politics in the rich theatrical tradition of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage.Lynn Nottage’s plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Fabulation, and Intimate Apparel, winner of the American Theatre Critics’ Steinberg New Play Award and the Francesca Primus Prize. Her plays have been widely produced, with Intimate Apparel receiving more productions than any other play in America during the 2005-2006 season.
The Lion in Winter
James Goldman - 1966
In James Goldman’s classic play The Lion in Winter, domestic turmoil rises to an art form. Keenly self-aware and motivated as much by spite as by any sense of duty, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine maneuver against each other to position their favorite son in line for succession. By imagining the inner lives of Henry, Eleanor, and their sons, John, Geoffrey, and Richard, Goldman created the quintessential drama of family strife and competing ambitions, a work that gives visceral, modern-day relevance to the intrigues of Angevin England. Combining keen historical and psychological insight with delicious, mordant wit, the stage play has become a touchstone of today’s theater scene, and Goldman’s screenplay for the 1968 film adaptation won him an Academy Award. Told in “marvelously articulate language, with humor that bristles and burns” (Los Angeles Times), The Lion in Winter is the rare play that bursts into life on the printed page.
Travesties
Tom Stoppard - 1975
Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could have been the meeting of these profoundly influential men in a germinal Europe as seen through the lucid, lurid, faulty, and wholy riveting memory of an aging Henry Carr.
Suddenly Last Summer
Tennessee Williams - 1958
Williams through the most sympathetic voice among his characters, 'is a true story about the time and the world we live in.' He has made it seem true-or at least curiously and suspensefully possible-by the extraordinary skill with which he has wrung detail after detail out of a young woman who has lived with horror. Anne Meacham, as a girl who has been the sole witness to her cousin's unbelievably shocking death, is brought into a 'planned jungle' of a New Orleans garden to confront a family that is intensely interested in having her deny the lurid tale she has told. The post-dilettante's mother is, indeed, so ruthlessly eager to suppress the facts that she had the girl incarcerated in a mental institution and she is perfectly willing, once she finishes her ritualistic five o'clock frozen daiquiri, to order the performance of a frontal lobotomy. A nun stands in rigid attendance; a doctor prepares a hypodermic to force the truth; greedy relatives beg her to recant in return for solid cash. Under the assorted, and thoroughly fascinating, pressures that are brought to bear, and under the intolerable, stammering strain of reliving her own memories, Miss Meacham slowly, painfully, hypnotically paints a concrete and blistering portrait of loneliness.of the sudden snapping of that spider's web that is one man's life, of ultimate panic and futile flight. The very reluctance with which the grim, hopeless narrative is unfolded binds us to it; Mr. Williams threads it out with a spare, sure, sharply vivid control of language.and the spell is cast."
Heroes of the Fourth Turning
Will Arbery - 2019
They've returned home to toast their mentor Gina, newly inducted as president of a tiny Catholic college. But as their reunion spirals into spiritual chaos and clashing generational politics, it becomes less a celebration than a vicious fight to be understood. On a chilly night in the middle of America, Will Arbery's haunting play offers grace and disarming clarity, speaking to the heart of a country at war with itself.
Mauritius
Theresa Rebeck - 2009
After their mother's death, two estranged half-sisters discover a book of rare stamps that may include the crown jewel for collectors. One sister tries to collect on the windfall, while the other resists for sentimental reasons. In this gripping tale, a seemingly simple sale becomes dangerous when three seedy, high-stakes collectors enter the sisters' world, willing to do anything to claim the rare find as their own.
The Great God Pan
Amy Herzog - 2013
Ms. Herzog writes with keen sensitivity to the complex weave of feelings embedded in all human relationships, with particular attention to the way we tiptoe around areas of radioactive emotion." - New York Times"Whatever the ideal contemporary American drama is, it has to look a lot like The Great God Pan. It is provocative and subtle, slowly, carefully revelatory, sweetly moving, thought-provoking, funny and insightful." - New York Observer"An intelligent, delicately articulate writer." - Village Voice"A moving and unsettling look at the nature of identity and the vagaries of memory. With subtlety and compassion, Herzog contemplates how well we can really know ourselves." - BackstageJamie's life in Brooklyn seems just fine: a beautiful girlfriend, a burgeoning journalism career, and parents who live just far enough away. But when a possible childhood trauma comes to light, lives are thrown into a tailspin. Unsettling and deeply compassionate, The Great God Pan tells the intimate tale of what is lost and won when a hidden truth is suddenly revealed.Amy Herzog's plays include 4000 Miles (Pulitzer Prize finalist), After the Revolution and Belleville. Ms. Herzog is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Whiting Writers' Award, an Obie Award and the Helen Merrill Award for Aspiring Playwrights.
The Nether
Jennifer Haley - 2014
No one has been able to draw a conclusive correlation between virtual behaviour and behaviour in-world.
The Nether is a virtual wonderland that provides total sensory immersion. Just log in, choose an identity and indulge your every desire. But when a young detective uncovers a disturbing brand of entertainment, she triggers an interrogation into the darkest corners of the imagination.Winner of the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, The Nether is both a serpentine crime drama and haunting sci-fi thriller that explores the consequences of living out our private dreams.Jennifer Haley's The Nether received its UK premiere in July 2014 at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in a co-production with Headlong.
Dancing at Lughnasa
Brian Friel - 1990
In a house just outside the village of Ballybeg live the five Mundy sisters, barely making ends meet, their ages ranging from twenty-six up to forty. The two male members of the household are brother Jack, a missionary priest, repatriated from Africa by his superiors after twenty-five years, and the seven-year-old child of the youngest sister. In depicting two days in the life of this menage, Brian Friel evokes not simply the interior landscape of a group of human beings trapped in their domestic situation, but the wider landscape, interior and exterior, Christian and pagan, of which they are nonetheless a part.
Fleabag: The Original Play
Phoebe Waller-Bridge - 2013
I'm not obsessed with sex. I just can't stop thinking about it.’
The Fleabag bites back. A rip-roaring account of some sort of female living her sort of life.Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s debut play is an outrageously funny monologue for a female performer. It premiered at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performed by Phoebe herself, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London, for several successful runs, followed by a UK tour. It won a Fringe First Award in Edinburgh, the Most Promising New Playwright and Best Female Performance at the Off West End Theatre Awards, The Stage Award for Best Solo Performer and the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright. It received a Special Commendation in the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre. In 2016 it was turned into a wildly successful and ‘utterly riveting’ (Guardian) BBC television series.This edition also features an introduction by the author.‘Believe the hype, Waller-Bridge’s raw writing… really is as good as everyone says’ - The Stage'Sucker-punch funny... I've never seen a play quite like it' - Scotsman'frank and sometimes brutally funny... devastatingly good' - The Times'blessed with a rare and compelling life force... deliciously dirty and scabrously funny' - Evening Standard
Fires in the Mirror
Anna Deavere Smith - 1993
Derived from interviews with a wide range of people who experienced or observed New York's 1991 Crown Heights racial riots, Fires In The Mirror is as distinguished a work of commentary on current Black-White tensions as it is a work of drama.